Thermaltake Commander MS-I Case Review

Introduction:

Thermaltake has quite the array of different cases and offer many unique styles. Most of them are designed for the game enthusiast and tend to have the “wow” factor already applied to them, in either colored fans or accented bodies. Where the range of style goes from a little more subtle to in your face. We recently took a look at the Overseer RX-I back in February, a rather blue friendly chassis. Today we’ll be taking a look at another one of Thermaltake's interesting creations, the Commander MS-I.

The Commander series is a set of four identical cases, each with their own color combination choices. We’ll be looking at the all black offering with the included blue LED rear fan. The series also has a Snow edition which is all white with black mesh and an Epic edition which has a red front bezel and tinted red window. This way you can fling for more, or take it down a notch and stick with the plain black. Either way, it’s always nice to see multiple color options with the same body. Let’s start looking at this chassis and see if it’s something that could be showing up on your doorstep soon or not.

Closer Look:

Thermaltake always has somewhat flashy boxes, always printed with some kind of creature, mech, futuristic thing, or planet. I’m guessing it’s supposed to play off the names of the different series, but I don’t really care – I just want the case! Thermaltake's older style logo of the sun swirl never really seems to fit in either, always stuck in one of the corners. Point is, you still always know it’s a Thermaltake box when it shows up.

The front of the box has an actual picture of the case in an isometric shot, so you know what you’re getting without even opening anything! The back of the box has detailed images, which can be found on their website, that show you the different angles of the case, a few shots of the inside, and of course its key selling features. The sides of the box are fairly typical. One side denotes what case is in the box from the series. As I had mentioned there are four cases, two of which are black – so a selector tells you if you have the one with the fan or without. The red and white versions of the case must have their own boxes, since they are not shown here as options. The other side lists the features from the back of the box in 12 different languages. A nice UPS sticker covers most of them up for me, not that I could read them anyway.

Caring less about the box itself and more about what is actually inside it, this needed to be opened and unpacked. Cutting open the tape revealed foam end caps and a plastic bag, pretty much the standard method of case shipping anymore. Flipping over the box and letting the case slide out, the right shot is what you end up with. Good packing again, as everything is intact. Even the delivery guy didn’t find a way to destroy the box or foam, so plus one to our delivery man.